Saturday, December 31, 2016

"For Sigmund Freud himself, the destruction drive is no longer a debatable hypothesis. Even if this speculation never takes the form of a fixed thesis, even if it is never posited, it is another name for Ananke, invincible necessity. It is as if Freud could no longer resist, henceforth, the irreducible and originary perversity of this drive which he names here sometimes death drive, sometimes aggression drive, sometimes destruction drive, as if these three words were in this case synonymous. Second, this three-named drive is mute. It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper movement. It works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with aview to effacing its own 'proper' traces – which consequently cannot properly be called 'proper'. It devours it even before producing it on the outside. This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic, anarchontic (we must not forget that the death drive, originary though it may be, is not a principle, as are the pleasure and reality principles): the death drive is above all anarchivic, once could say, or archiviolithic. It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation."
"Allowing for exceptions. But what are exceptions in this case? Even when it takes the form of an interior desire, the anarchy drive eludes perception, to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints itself in some erotic color. This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin. In other words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death."

A medieval tradition of representation informed the early Renaissance painting above. The human ancestry of Christ had long been illustrated with charts showing schematic figures distributed among branches of schematic trees. E.H. Gombrich points out in The Preference for the Primitive (Phaidon, 2002) that the new 15th-century fashion for fully illusionistic figures inhabiting illusionistic space was grafted onto older, non-naturalistic schematic forms. The Tree of Jesse by Geertgen tot Sint Jans of the Netherlands was Gombrich's favorite example of this anomaly – an entire cast of full-sized, three-dimensional, fashionably-dressed courtiers swarming the branches of a modest naturalistic tree – this excess of naturalism creating an overall impression of intense weirdness.

Friday, December 30, 2016

"Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed the introduction of a group of technologies and formats that would quickly attain a newly elevated status. These included the oil painting, executed on canvas at an easel; the drawing in ink, chalk, or pastel on paper; the medal; and the print. In some cases, these media replaced earlier ways of doing things ... oil supplanted the earlier egg-based tempera painting, for example, and canvas gradually took over the role of the wooden panel. Other formats with more continuous histories, such as the small bronze and the marble statue, became a focus of attention in the same years in a way that they had not for centuries before. Into the early twentieth century, being an "artist" usually meant making the sorts of things that fifteenth-century Italians had introduced."– Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, A New History of Italian Renaissance Art (London : Thames & Hudson, 2012)

Domenico GhirlandaioFrancesco Sassetti and his son
ca. 1488
tempera on panelMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Michele GiambonoMan of Sorrows
ca. 1430
tempera on panelMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fra Filippo LippiPortrait of a woman and a man at a casement
ca. 1440
tempera on panelMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Filippino LippiYouths
1480s
drawingMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Filippino LippiYouths
ca. 1485
drawingBritish Museum, London

follower of Andrea MantegnaCopy of Mantegna's design for a fountain
15th century
drawingBritish Museum, London

The Impressionists famously broke down the representation of solid forms into a struggle to represent light reflections – their main claim to newness. At an even more basic level of form, though, they seldom altered (or even questioned) the conventional two-dimensional representation of three dimensional space using linear perspective. Instead these academically-trained artists continued to exploit the conventional depiction of receding space that had remained constant in European painting for at least five hundred years. This was the final generation of serious painters in the West who could operate without challenging spatial illusionism.

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."